Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Philosophy

Advisor

David Rosenthal

Committee Members

Eric Mandelbaum

Michael Brownstein

Subject Categories

Epistemology | Philosophy of Mind | Philosophy of Science

Keywords

belief, cognitive architecture, rationality, fragmentation, implicit attitudes, representationalism

Abstract

This dissertation is an exploration of the idea that human minds are fragmented and its implications for some ongoing debates in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Let Fragmentation be, minimally, the view that human cognitive information access is best modeled as having a structure that permits for selective, variable-mediated access, instead of a structure that enables always-on, global access. In chapter 1, I canvass the motivation for this view, its many variants, and some of the key open questions that it raises, situating this project in the broader landscape of work on the view. In chapter 2 I argue that even minimal Fragmentation is not totally neutral about the nature of belief, because it undercuts some classic arguments that representationalism under-generates belief and also undermines the explanatory power of naïve dispositionalism. In chapter 3, I argue that Fragmentation gives us a way of explaining the oddities of implicit attitudes while maintaining that they are beliefs. More generally, I argue that the possibility of fragmented agents helps reveal how hard it is to draw a distinction in kind between implicit and explicit attitudes. In the fourth chapter, I argue that Fragmentation generates a dilemma for people that think there are norms of rationality: the norms of rationality can’t be both impersonal and interfragmentary. Specifically, I argue that the norms of rationality must themselves be fragmented if they are to be impersonal, but that there are compelling instances of interfragmentary norms and that whether one rejects that the requirement of rationality must be impersonal or that any are interfragmentary there are interesting costs and upshots for the nature of rationality more broadly. For instance, it trivially follows that if there are no interfragmentary rules of rationality, then it simply cannot be irrational for an agent’s beliefs to be fragmented, no matter how inconsistent the fragments are or how idealized the agent is.

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